Do you think a societal collapse is inevitable?

How would it be difficult to avoid it? Do you not consider the thousands of years of slow, stumbling but steady progress of mankind to be the decider of our future course? Because that's how I feel about it.

Only by accident could this happen in my opinion, as in, an accidental nuclear blast or asteroid impact or other event in space that affects us dramatically, etcetera.
 
Frankly, I think we're going towards pretty nasty future. There are various studies from reputable institutions publicized in books or press, claiming that our constantly growing population would stop to grow somewhere at 11 billions due to food and water shortages; that's the point when our current system would start collapsing - famine, resource wars, diseases.. Yup, I'm a pessimist.
 
Slavery is always a temptation, and we can see in the world today, that we are trying to employ as much of it as our legal loopholes permit.

On the other hand, there isn't *one* society on earth, but thousands. Societies fall apart now and then, and then they rebuild.

But yeah, not to sound like an old commie, but capitalism is gonna be the death of us all - eventually. Well, the death of us all in selected societies, and then we rebuild.
 
Akratus said:
How would it be difficult to avoid it? Do you not consider the thousands of years of slow, stumbling but steady progress of mankind to be the decider of our future course? Because that's how I feel about it.

Only by accident could this happen in my opinion, as in, an accidental nuclear blast or asteroid impact or other event in space that affects us dramatically, etcetera.
Click to expand...
I do consider it, but going on from the pattern of most societies collapsing at a certain time or age like Mediterranean civilizations, the Roman Empire, Mesopotamian civilizations, and Egypt it's pretty difficult to avoid most forms of collapse of civilization. Here let me show you this- http://news.nationalpost.com/news/t...-be-difficult-to-avoid-nasa-funded-study-says

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...sation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

It maybe difficult. But it's not impossible.
 
I consider it to be likely but not absolute. If neoliberalism continues on the path it's taking, it's going to end up being a very miserable world. Same can be said for the pseudo-communist regimes overseas, only even worse. Actually if humanity just generally keeps going the way it is our natural resources are gonna dry up anyway.

Happy times. People are often short-sighted and unable to look at the bigger picture unless it benefits them to do so. What can ya do?
 
Sn1p3r187 said:
Akratus said:
How would it be difficult to avoid it? Do you not consider the thousands of years of slow, stumbling but steady progress of mankind to be the decider of our future course? Because that's how I feel about it.

Only by accident could this happen in my opinion, as in, an accidental nuclear blast or asteroid impact or other event in space that affects us dramatically, etcetera.
Click to expand...
I do consider it, but going on from the pattern of most societies collapsing at a certain time or age like Mediterranean civilizations, the Roman Empire, Mesopotamian civilizations, and Egypt it's pretty difficult to avoid most forms of collapse of civilization. Here let me show you this- http://news.nationalpost.com/news/t...-be-difficult-to-avoid-nasa-funded-study-says

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...sation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

It maybe difficult. But it's not impossible.
Click to expand...

Doesn't mean that a colapse has always to mean the end though, if you look at the Sovietunion and their colapse, you could say that the Soviet society ceased to exist at that point, at least on the state level, nostalgia and post-soviet ideals are a story for it self. But it didn't mean the end for those nations or to the colapse of everything.

However, there is no doubt that the 10 years after the colapse marked a very harsh point for all the post-soviet states.

I do believe that with our current course we are heading toward a catastrophe, econmically and ecologically. 30% of the worlds population is consuming 40% of the resources. And yet, capitalism is sold as the only viable economy that can bring prosperity for every human beeing on this planet, when it can't even do that for everyone living inside the capitalistic system. Capitalism has turned from an ideal to an ideology, a form of religion with make believ and faith. To get to the point. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that our curent way of life is pretty much bound to disaster. People want everything, everywhere and all at the same time. That won't work. We have not enough resources to give everyone 6 smartphones, 2 cars, 4 TVs, and who knows what else. And of course each of those gadgets has to be replaced every 6-12 months.

However, is everything doom and gloom? That remains to be seen. It could eventually lead to a colapse of the western world at some point. Who knows? If the other 70% of this world decide, fuck them! They can exist better witout oil, gold, coper, and all sorts of electronics than we do. Their economy doesn't depend so much on oil and international trade. I am pretty sure that communities in the third world which ARE already poor could deal much better with the crysis than we can. Right now most of the things we do, including military actions and economic decisions have the task to keep the status quo. Making sure that our way of live isn't threatened. You can convince people very fast to do something against their interests when you tell them that their jobs is at risk. What? You want me to preseve the environment? Sure! As long I don't have to pay a higher price for my Burger! Helping other people? Sure! A slong I don't have to give up in my air conditioner!

But even if we assume that the United Stats, Western Europe and if you want even Russia and China colapse, would that mean the end of the world or human society? Maybe it won't. Who knows that? Maybe if those 30% colapse it would actually lead to an improvement for the other 70%. Of course only if the colapse doesn't lead to something like a nuclear war.
 
Yes, we will see societal collapse in the future, but the theories of it being a global scale catastrophe are overly fatalistic and also unrealistic. Societies have collapsed, on large proportions, dozens of times in history - the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian Genocide, the Soviet Union, the Turkish and Greek wars of independence, Yugoslavia... all examples of empires that have crumbled on all levels and on some cases, political and economical organization ceased to exist, yet you'll see that in all cases they all eventually just reformed into new countries and in history the impact of their disappearance did not extend too far because different societies existed at the same time and are always developing. The best example is, of course, the Western Roman Empire. Early in its formation, Rome developed an aggressive military society that rewarded conquest. As it began to conquer its immediate neighbors, it became wealthy stealing their food, resources, and taking their population as slaves (and using those things to fuel their growth). But it eventually reached a point where it couldn't expand any further, due to the great size of its borders, the high price of the military necessary to guard that border, and the risk that distant governors become so militarily powerful that they threatened the leadership in Rome. As soon as its primary source of wealth dried up, the economy started to collapse. They took a lot of measures to avoid that collapse, but in the end, they had to pull their armies back and abandon territories. It got to the point where they didn't have enough wealth left to support a military strong enough to protect Rome itself, and it was overrun.

So Rome just ceased to exist then, and to the Romans of the time that was surely as much of a collapse to their society as we imagine can happen to ours today. But while the consequences of the end of the empire were monumental, historically and culturally, that wasn't the end of human development. Because there were still the barbarian societies, and Asia, the Arabs, India, the African kingdoms, the Byzantines, etc. None of those societies were as impressive as Rome was in its brightest day, and much of Europe still suffered for a long period of slow development in the feudal age, but ultimately the fall of Rome is now seen as just a huge transformation rather than as something that set mankind back centuries, as people could have believed back then.

In other words, just as sure as all the empires that have ever existed eventually failed, so will the USA, and China, and the EU and whatever else we have today. And it will probably be because of an obvious cause like misuse of resources. But it won't be something that will make the world miserable or throw humanity back to a severely underdeveloped state. Even in our globalized world, it's impossible to take down all of society, or even a significant part of it. You'll see that even if there's a massive, disastrous collapse of major world powers, people will reorganize themselves into a new order far quicker than anybody expects.
 
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